“I couldn’t,” said his sister Amy firmly. “I’m sure you’d better have a prompter.”
Mumma supported Amy. “Some of you are sure to get stage fright and to break down on the night, and that’s when the prompter is useful. When someone gets stage fright, you know, and breaks down.”
Captain Patch asked me afterwards if it was absolutely necessary for General and Mrs. Kendal to attend every rehearsal. He said that Mrs. Kendal was breaking his nerve. And the General thought, and spoke, of nothing but his Hessian boots. Bill put in a song about them on purpose to please him and Martyn—Ivan Petruski Skivah—sang it.
Mrs. Harter did not attend any of the early rehearsals. She had nothing to do with the play, really, and was only to sing “The Bulbul Ameer” before the curtain went up and again at the end of the play. I think Nancy Fazackerly had made Bill understand that Claire would not welcome Mrs. Harter to the rehearsals.
One day old Mr. Carey came. He made us all rather nervous, and his daughter, at the piano, lost her head completely.
“Father is such a personality,” I heard her murmuring to Christopher—a phrase which she generally reserved for those who had no personal experience of her father’s peculiarities.
That was after old Carey had criticized a bit of dialogue which he attributed to his daughter’s authorship and which afterwards turned out to have been written by Bill Patch quite independently.
“I know nothing whatever about writing,” said Carey, who, like many other people, appeared to think this in itself a reason for offering an opinion on the subject. “In fact, I’m willing to admit that it seems to me a damned waste of time for any full-grown person to sit and scribble a lot of nonsense about something that never happened, and never could have happened, for other full-grown persons to learn by heart and gabble off like a lot of board-school children. However, that’s as it may be. What you young people don’t realize is that there are things going on all around you every day that would beat the plot of any story, or any play, hollow.”
When old Carey had said this, he looked round him triumphantly, as though he had just made a new and valuable contribution to the subject of literature.
He also said that anyone could write, if only they had the time, and that reading novels was only fit for women, and that generally he had enough to do reading the Times every day, with an occasional detective story if he had nothing better to do.